Google Chrome Lands in Hot Water for Paid Links

Posted 04/01/2012

This week, Google has been forced to penalise its own web browser, Google Chrome, in the search rankings due to its use of paid, dofollow inbound links. The links were appearing in (often poorly written – Panda update, anyone?) blog posts directing users to a video about the browser, and promoting Google Chrome as a lifeline for small businesses.

Although the links do not go to Chrome’s homepage – rather to the Chrome video – it doesn’t look good, especially coming from a company that’s penalised big names such as JC Penney and Forbes in the past for using, you’ve guessed it… paid links.

The story began with a post by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Journal, which speculates that bloggers were paid to write about whatever they wanted, with the caveat that the Chrome video appeared in the post (Matt Cutts seemed to confirm this when he stated in a post on Google+ that the posts are a result of Google buying video ads for Chrome). It then spread pretty quickly, with many others speculating what action (if any) Google would take against itself.

And, to their credit, Google’s webspam team have acted as they would with any other company caught flouting their guidelines, and according to Matt Cutts’s Google+ post, have demoted the Google Chrome homepage and reduced its page rank for 60 days. The Chrome homepage now no longer ranks in the top 10 for “Chrome”, “”Google Chrome”, “browser” or “web browser”

That being said, the Chrome homepage is still ranking, but only as a sitelink under the Support page:

So what can we take away from Google’s mistake?

Well, if Google can fall foul of its own guidelines, it demonstrates the need to be especially vigilant when it comes to inbound links to your site, and to make sure you’re not using any blackhat (using unethical SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing or getting paid links) practices in your own efforts.

Google’s problems this week show that any company, no matter how innocent its intentions, can get itself into hot water.

There’s been some recent attention in the news involving a Google campaign (see linked article). Here’s some context on what happened.

We want to be perfectly clear here: Google never approved a sponsored-post campaign. They only agreed to buy online video ads. Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users.

In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this.

And, I see that Matt Cutts has also provided an overview from the Google Web Spam team perspective, and the decision to impose a 60 day penalty. Matt’s post is on Google Plus (https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts), so thought I would copy his text here:

I’ll give the short summary, then I’ll describe the webspam team’s response. Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent result of that. If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote http://www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of http://www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.